1 comment:

Wow, beautiful and fascinating. I love natural history and the whole early cult of collecting and classifying and studying specimens. i don't think scientists take specimens out of the wild and kill them anymore, do they? In those days, it was probably so much harder to study creatures in their natural habitat and hard to document them with early photography the only tool, other than, of course, the abundant drawings (which require creatures to sit still and be ideally...dead).

I love places like this. We have a wonderful museum of this kind in Banff, not far from here.